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Richard Pipes

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Richard Pipes, Warsaw (Poland), October 20, 2004
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Richard Pipes, Warsaw (Poland), October 20, 2004

Richard Edgar Pipes (b. July 11, 1923) is an American scholar who specializes in Russian history.

Contents

Career

Richard Edgar Pipes (b. July 11, 1923) is a Polish American scholar who is a specialist in Russian history. Pipes was born in Cieszyn, Poland to a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. His father was a diplomat with the Polish foreign office. By Pipes's own account, during his childhood and youth, he never thought about the Soviet Union; the major cultural influences on him were Polish and German culture. The Jewish Pipes family fled Poland in October 1939 and arrived in the United States in July 1940, after a brief period passing through Fascist Italy.[#endnote_Romano] Pipes became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943 while serving in the United States Army Air Corps. He was educated at Muskingum College, Cornell University and Harvard. He married Irene Eugenia Roth in 1946, and had two children with her. His son Daniel Pipes is a neoconservative scholar and specialist in Middle East history and affairs and a former appointee to the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Pipes taught at Harvard University starting in 1950 until his retirement in 1996. He was the director of Harvard’s Russian Research Center from 1968-73 and is now Baird Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He acted as senior consultant at the Stanford Research Institute from 1973-78. During the 1970s, he was an adviser to Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson. In 1981 and 1982 he served as a member of the National Security Council holding the post of Director of East European and Soviet Affairs under President Ronald Reagan. Pipes was a member of the Committee on Present Danger from 1977 until 1992 and serves on the Council of Foreign Relations. In the 1970s, Pipes was a leading critic of detente, which he described as "inspired by intellectual indolence and based on ignorance of one's antagonist and therefore inherently inept"[#endnote_2] .

Richard Pipes has written 21 books and is a member of several editorial boards.

Honors

Pipes has an extensive list of honors, including: Honorary Consul of the Republic of Georgia, Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Commander’s Cross of Merit of the Republic of Poland, Honorary DHL at Adelphi College, Honorary LLD at Muskingum College, Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Silesia, Annual Spring Lecturer of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Institute, Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies and recipient of the George Louis Beer Prize of the American Historical Association.[link]

Team B

Main article: Team B

Pipes was head of the 1976 Team B, comprised of civilian experts and retired military officers and created by then CIA director George Bush as a competitive analysis exercise. Team B was created as antagonist force to a group of CIA intelligence officials, known as Team A, and argued that the National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet Union, generated yearly by the CIA, underestimated Soviet military power and misinterpreted Soviet strategic intentions.

A top CIA analyst called it "a kangaroo court of outside critics all picked from one point of view." Others said its mission was to hype the Soviet threat. Pipes disagrees. "We dealt with one problem only: What is the Soviet strategy for nuclear weapons? Team B was appointed to look at the evidence and to see if we could conclude that the actual Soviet strategy is different from ours. It's now demonstrated totally, completely, that it was," he says, adducing documents in Polish archives that show the Soviets planning to use nuclear weapons in the event of war.[link]

Team B also came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several new weapons, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology.[#endnote_anatomy] This information was later proven to be false. Pipes in 1986 responded that history shows that Team B overall contributed to creating more realistic estimates.[link] According to Dr. Anne Cahn in 2004 (Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-1980) "I would say that all of it was fantasy... if you go through most of Team B's specific allegations about weapons systems, and you just examine them one by one, they were all wrong."[#endnote_righting][link]

Anti-Communist

Pipes has written many books on Russian history, including Russia under the Old Regime (1974), The Russian Revolution (1995) and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (1994), and has been a frequent and prominent interviewee in the press on the matters of Soviet history and foreign affairs. His writings also appear in Commentary, The New York Times and the Moscow Times. In all of his writings, Pipes has advanced his strongly anti-communist views.

Pipes is famous for arguing that the origins of the Soviet Union can be traced to the separate path taken by 15th century Muscovy in a Russian version of the Sonderweg thesis. In Pipes's opinion, Muscovy differed from every state in Europe in that in his opinion, there was no concept of private property in Muscovy, and that everything was regarded as the property of the Grand Duke\Tsar. In Pipes's view, this separate path undertaken by Russia ensured that Russia would always be a autocratic state with values fundamentally dissimilar to the values of Western civilization. Pipes has argued that this "patrimonialism" of Imperial Russia started to break down when Russian leaders attempted to modernize in the 19th century without seeking however to change the basic "patrimonial" structure of Russian society. In Pipes's opinion, this separate course undertaken by Russia over the centuries left Russia uniquely open to what Pipes sees as a Communist hi-jacking in 1917. Pipes has strongly criticized the values of the radical intelligentsia of later Imperial Russia for what he sees as their unreasoning fanaticism and socialism, and inability to accept reality. The Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has often denounced Pipes's work as "the Polish version of Russian history". Pipes in his turn has often accused Solzhenitsyn of being an anti-Semitic Russian ultra-nationalist, who in Pipes's opinion seeks to blame the ills of Communism on the Jews rather than to admit to the Russian roots of the Soviet Union.

From the left, criticism of Pipes’s interpretation of the events of 1917 has come from a number of social historians such as Lynne Viola and Sheila Fitzpatrick, who contend that there were wider social movements involving workers, sailors, peasants, and soldiers at work in 1917 and that Pipes has focused too narrowly on intellectuals as causal agents. Pipes in his turn has often criticized both Viola and Fitzpatrick as apologists for Soviet terror.

Pipes has argued that the Soviet Union was an expansionist, totalitarian state bent on world conquest. He is also notable for his thesis that, contrary to many traditional histories of the USSR at the time, the "October Revolution" was, rather than a popular general uprising, a coup foisted upon the majority of the Russian population (and national minorities) by a tiny segment of the population driven by a select group of intellectuals who subsequently established a one-party dictatorship which was intolerant and repressive from the start, rather than having deviated from an initially benign course. In Pipes's view, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a total disaster as allowed what he regards as the small section of the "fanatical" intelligentsia to carry out policies that in Pipes's opinion were completely unrealistic from the beginning.

Pipes is a leading advocate of the Totalitarianism school that sees Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as being fundamentally similar regimes pursing similar policies. Citing the work of such historians as James Gregor, Henry Ashby Turner, Renzo De Felice, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Ernst Nolte and David Schoenbaum together with the work of Hermann Rauschning, Pipes in a chapter in his book Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime argued that there is no such thing as generic fascism, and that the Third Reich, the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy were all totalitarian regimes united by their antipathy to democracy.

Richard Pipes, in an off-the-record interview, told Reuters in March 1981 that "Soviet leaders would have to choose between peacefully changing their Communist system in the direction followed by the West or going to war. There is no other alternative and it could go either way… Detente is dead.” Pipes also stated in the interview that Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of West Germany was susceptible to pressure from the Soviets. It was learned independently that Pipes was the official who spoke to Reuters. This potentially jeopardized Pipes's job. The White House and the “incensed” State Department issued statements repudiating Pipes's statements.[#endnote_1981] Pipes, however, stayed on for a full two years, after which he returned to Harvard because his leave of absence had concluded.

In 1992, Pipes was an expert witness in the Russian Constitutional Court’s trial of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Works

References

Notes

  1. ↑  ;
  2. ↑  Bogle, Lori Lyn "Pipes, Richard" page 922.
  3. ↑  Source: New York Times, March 19, 1981 & Washington Post, October 21, 1981.
  4. ↑ 
  5. ↑ 
  6. ↑  ; ;

 

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